I know this isn't technically a text adventure but I also don't technically do reviews daily either.
Also Known As La Beth was Richard Garriott's first game which is weird because I would have thought it would have been Also Known As Lord British. I mean, "La Beth" is sort of close to "Lord British" if your mouth is full of gummy worms. So I guess it works. Although it's also weird that in the first self-published version of Akalabeth, Richard calls himself "Shamino Salle Dacil" (I don't have any faith in Google Translate but if you use it to translate "Salle Dacil" from French to English, it says it means "bathroom"). So was Richard Garriott Shamino or Lord British? I know I'm getting ahead of myself but, if I remember correctly, isn't it hinted at in one of the later games that they're the same person? I bet Richard Garriott didn't have enough confidence early in his career to think of himself as the lord of the realm. But seeing himself as the bard, as the person who tells the story, was an easy way to insert himself into the game. Although even that probably came after he had already begun to call himself Lord British. I could probably resolve all of this by using the Internet but what kind of existence is that? "Hey everybody! Let's not ponder and question things! Let's just get right to the answer by checking Wikipedia, thus assuring that we'll instantly forget the information because we spent absolutely no time mulling it over in our own heads! And who cares if we remember it anyway?! It's always there on the Internet for when we're half-heartedly curious about it later!"
Now that I've reviewed the Internet, let's see if Richard Garriott's first game was as surprisingly decent as I'm going to judge it being! Should I not have said that so soon? Would it have been better to keep my final conclusion a tense mystery throughout the review? If I had written The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis would have appeared on screen the first time by jumping out from around a corner, yelling "Boo!" at his wife, and then winking into the camera.
Akalabeth begins by asking the player their favorite number. This is because random number generation on computers is difficult. Technically, "random" doesn't exist in a computer's perspective. So you have to find ways to trick the computer into thinking it's doing something random. I'm pretty sure whatever causes this (logic, I guess? Did Vulcans have a word for random?) is the entire reason why iTunes shuffle feature is fucking dog turds (fucking here can be read as both emphasizing "dog turds" and also what iTunes shuffle does to dog turds). I don't remember what number I picked for my first game but it was between 1 and 10 because my first stupid thought was that I was limited to those numbers. The game doesn't say anything about that though! That was just society's and pop culture's influence on my weak-willed brain. I also chose the hardest difficulty (which was a choice from 1 to 10 so suck it, everybody who judged me for being influenced by everything that ever happened to me in my entire life. One time, a now ex-girlfriend of mine pointed out that my belief that well groomed pubic hair (not shaved! Just, you know, groomed so it doesn't stick out all over the place when you're wearing tight underwear!) was due to society's influence on me. I just shrugged and pointed out that however the fuck the belief got inside my head, I just know, aesthetically, I prefer groomed pubic hair. And how could I defend a position where that was entirely of my own preference when obviously every single thing I think has been influenced by all of my experiences which, coincidentally, all happened to take place within this fucking society that I never asked to be a part of! At some later date, she confided in me that she, too, preferred groomed pubic hair simply because it looked nicer. Well fucking hell! Why take me to task for it if you thought that too, you jerk! That's why you're an ex-girlfriend!). I died fairly quickly in that game because dungeons are dangerous and you never seem to gain enough hit points to cover the amount of hit points you lose in the dungeon.
After dying, I decided to try again and didn't think "Maybe playing at the highest difficulty is the problem?" So I chose my "favorite number" of 32 (I think. Maybe it was a different one!) and, once again, chose difficulty setting 10. But this time, I decided to be a little more systematic about it! So I went into the first dungeon where I quickly fought a thief. I hit it, it hit me for one damage, and then I hit and killed it. I then left the dungeon. Upon leaving the dungeon, I gained two hit points. There's no way to level up in this game. You just gain and lose hit points based on your dungeon expeditions. It didn't seem great that I could barely gain any hit points at all even after one fight. So I tried two fights. The first thing I noticed was that I once again fought the thief with the exact same results. Next I fought a skeleton where I lost one hit point in the battle. Upon leaving the dungeon, I once again gained only two hit points. So that expedition was worse than the first one!
Armed with such stellar research information, I decided to try to kill the thief without getting hit (sometimes he just steals stuff!). That would garner me a two hit point raise instead of just the one due to being damaged in the battle. What I learned was random number generators on computers (and especially early computers from 1980!) suck. No wait. I didn't learn that from this game. This game just made me remember that. Richard's "lucky number" seed at the beginning of the game could come up with a series of numbers that appeared "random" when compared to other games using different seed numbers. But for each individual game, that meant the random number chain was the same every time. So this dungeon experience would use the same rolls and offer the same results every time. Sure, I could move around the dungeon differently. But my first attack would always hit. And the monster's first attack would always hit. And because of that, this dungeon was currently useless to me. I just couldn't gain much of a hit point advantage for using it. I assumed the other dungeons would be different since their layouts were different. They probably all got assigned a number along the "random number generation" chain causing them to all technically be different. I didn't do any experiments to see if that were true but then I didn't have to because I quickly learned something else about the random number generator that I exploited mercilessly.
Now that I've reviewed the Internet, let's see if Richard Garriott's first game was as surprisingly decent as I'm going to judge it being! Should I not have said that so soon? Would it have been better to keep my final conclusion a tense mystery throughout the review? If I had written The Sixth Sense, Bruce Willis would have appeared on screen the first time by jumping out from around a corner, yelling "Boo!" at his wife, and then winking into the camera.
Akalabeth begins by asking the player their favorite number. This is because random number generation on computers is difficult. Technically, "random" doesn't exist in a computer's perspective. So you have to find ways to trick the computer into thinking it's doing something random. I'm pretty sure whatever causes this (logic, I guess? Did Vulcans have a word for random?) is the entire reason why iTunes shuffle feature is fucking dog turds (fucking here can be read as both emphasizing "dog turds" and also what iTunes shuffle does to dog turds). I don't remember what number I picked for my first game but it was between 1 and 10 because my first stupid thought was that I was limited to those numbers. The game doesn't say anything about that though! That was just society's and pop culture's influence on my weak-willed brain. I also chose the hardest difficulty (which was a choice from 1 to 10 so suck it, everybody who judged me for being influenced by everything that ever happened to me in my entire life. One time, a now ex-girlfriend of mine pointed out that my belief that well groomed pubic hair (not shaved! Just, you know, groomed so it doesn't stick out all over the place when you're wearing tight underwear!) was due to society's influence on me. I just shrugged and pointed out that however the fuck the belief got inside my head, I just know, aesthetically, I prefer groomed pubic hair. And how could I defend a position where that was entirely of my own preference when obviously every single thing I think has been influenced by all of my experiences which, coincidentally, all happened to take place within this fucking society that I never asked to be a part of! At some later date, she confided in me that she, too, preferred groomed pubic hair simply because it looked nicer. Well fucking hell! Why take me to task for it if you thought that too, you jerk! That's why you're an ex-girlfriend!). I died fairly quickly in that game because dungeons are dangerous and you never seem to gain enough hit points to cover the amount of hit points you lose in the dungeon.
After dying, I decided to try again and didn't think "Maybe playing at the highest difficulty is the problem?" So I chose my "favorite number" of 32 (I think. Maybe it was a different one!) and, once again, chose difficulty setting 10. But this time, I decided to be a little more systematic about it! So I went into the first dungeon where I quickly fought a thief. I hit it, it hit me for one damage, and then I hit and killed it. I then left the dungeon. Upon leaving the dungeon, I gained two hit points. There's no way to level up in this game. You just gain and lose hit points based on your dungeon expeditions. It didn't seem great that I could barely gain any hit points at all even after one fight. So I tried two fights. The first thing I noticed was that I once again fought the thief with the exact same results. Next I fought a skeleton where I lost one hit point in the battle. Upon leaving the dungeon, I once again gained only two hit points. So that expedition was worse than the first one!
Armed with such stellar research information, I decided to try to kill the thief without getting hit (sometimes he just steals stuff!). That would garner me a two hit point raise instead of just the one due to being damaged in the battle. What I learned was random number generators on computers (and especially early computers from 1980!) suck. No wait. I didn't learn that from this game. This game just made me remember that. Richard's "lucky number" seed at the beginning of the game could come up with a series of numbers that appeared "random" when compared to other games using different seed numbers. But for each individual game, that meant the random number chain was the same every time. So this dungeon experience would use the same rolls and offer the same results every time. Sure, I could move around the dungeon differently. But my first attack would always hit. And the monster's first attack would always hit. And because of that, this dungeon was currently useless to me. I just couldn't gain much of a hit point advantage for using it. I assumed the other dungeons would be different since their layouts were different. They probably all got assigned a number along the "random number generation" chain causing them to all technically be different. I didn't do any experiments to see if that were true but then I didn't have to because I quickly learned something else about the random number generator that I exploited mercilessly.
If I had been Dick Garriott, instead of the awkward "a(n)" bit, I would have simply not had any monsters whose names began with a vowel. Or my string variables would have included the indefinite article. I think BASIC was capable of that, right? I mean, it was capable of creating an entire fucking dungeon crawling game!
I jumped in a few other dungeons as I searched for Lord British's castle (seen above) and eventually found a magic amulet. Being that I was playing a fighter, I couldn't control the amulet. If you used it, it had a chance to do a number of random things: create a down ladder, create an up ladder, blast a creature, blast yourself with a backfire (taking away half your hit points), turning you into a toad (which set all your attributes at 3 and, maybe, made you eat more?), or turning you into a lizard man (doubling your hit points and your stats). Returning back to my first dungeon which I knew intimately (and by "intimately", I mean I knew about the first five or so "random" number generation moves. To an emotionally distant misanthrope, that's pretty fucking intimate), I decided to play with the magic amulet to see how truly "random" it was. Lucky for me, I discovered that it does the same thing every time if you invoke it on the first move. And in that first dungeon, it turned me into a lizard man. Which meant if I kept entering, invoking, and leaving, I could become the greatest fucking lizard man to ever live!
Which is what I did. Nerds will be able to sort of read the exponential numbers which my stats and hit points have become, even if they've grown so large that they merge with my inventory items.
After becoming unbeatable, I went on Lord British's stupid missions. I mapped about eight levels of a dungeon near Lord British's castle so I could quickly head in, kill the monster, and get out. Each level was only a 9 x 9 grid and the ladders were always at positions 3,3 and 7,7. So it wasn't difficult to only map as much of each dungeon as I needed to zip up and down. The only difficulty were the trap doors that suddenly dropped you down a level. But they dropped you at the same point on the grid below, so it was really just a hassle. And with my amazing stats, I killed everything in one hit. So finding and killing a mimic was no problem.
Why does Lord British scream when I re-enter the castle? Did that fucking asshole expect me to die?! His dumb quest was simply trying to get the fucking peasant out of his castle, wasn't it?! No wonder I've never trusted that goat dick.
Maybe I'm being too harsh on Lord British and he only screamed because I suddenly looked like the lizard man version of The Incredible Hulk. Maybe if you aren't a lizard man, he says, "Oh, Grunion Guy, I was just thinking about you! I am glad to see you have returned!" Instead, he screams like I caught him jerking off to substandard porn and then grants me the incredible gift of a one point attribute raise. Thanks, jerk, but I only get off on exponential growth now!
Using my map, I quickly killed a daemon and returned to startle Lord British again. This time, he asked me to kill a balrog which seemed like a crazy thing to ask a peasant who would, in a game where somebody didn't exploit the lizard man system, would have only had two attribute raises. I killed it easily enough because the only real danger in the dungeon to a steroid-crazed muscular oaf are gremlins who steal half of your food. Upon returning to Lord British, I discovered he must not have known the names of any more dangerous monsters because I was done with my quest!
Using my map, I quickly killed a daemon and returned to startle Lord British again. This time, he asked me to kill a balrog which seemed like a crazy thing to ask a peasant who would, in a game where somebody didn't exploit the lizard man system, would have only had two attribute raises. I killed it easily enough because the only real danger in the dungeon to a steroid-crazed muscular oaf are gremlins who steal half of your food. Upon returning to Lord British, I discovered he must not have known the names of any more dangerous monsters because I was done with my quest!
A 415 area code? Where was California Pacific Computer? Mountain View? Sunnyvale? I probably could have taken a Polaroid of this screen and biked down to California Pacific Computer if I'd done this as a kid.
Don't fucking argue with me about the area code for those places being 650 simply because you think you know the Silicon Valley now. Everything north/northwest of Santa Clara was 415 for nearly my entire time living there so fuck off with your "post-1997" interpretation of the area. You think you fucking know the place better than I do. Just like that fucking asshole Tinder date of the friend of my Non-Certified Spouse who we met when she came to town for a few days. Fucking prick thought I was an asshole for referring to Santa Clara and San Jose as the Bay Area. Get the fuck out of here, you nobody know-nothing piece of shit motherfucker! I will knife you.
Anyway, Akalabeth was a surprisingly decent game! Although I don't know if defeating at difficulty level ten would have actually been possible without using the lizard man exploit. I guess if you were a twelve year old kid in 1980 with nothing else to do because you hated the sun and the surf and riding your BMX around the neighborhood so your parents spent a fortune giving you an old Apple computer in the hopes that they wouldn't have to watch you play Dungeons and Dragons all by yourself at the kitchen table anymore, maybe you could have done it. For some reason that maybe isn't the Internet but almost certainly is, it seems like we all had a lot more time to concentrate on things back then.
Anyway, Akalabeth was a surprisingly decent game! Although I don't know if defeating at difficulty level ten would have actually been possible without using the lizard man exploit. I guess if you were a twelve year old kid in 1980 with nothing else to do because you hated the sun and the surf and riding your BMX around the neighborhood so your parents spent a fortune giving you an old Apple computer in the hopes that they wouldn't have to watch you play Dungeons and Dragons all by yourself at the kitchen table anymore, maybe you could have done it. For some reason that maybe isn't the Internet but almost certainly is, it seems like we all had a lot more time to concentrate on things back then.
